Utilization of Shellfish Industrial Waste for Isolation, Purification, and Characterizations of Chitin From Crustacean’s Sources in Pakistan

Chitin is the most versatile and promising biomaterial after cellulose which can primarily be isolated from crustacean exoskeleton. It has great economic values because of their excellent chemical and biological properties, and their biomedical and industrial applications. This research work aims to report the yield and quality of chitin which has been isolated from crustacean’s waste of shellfish industry of Pakistan using chemical method alternating sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, and hydrogen peroxide. The physicochemical properties of chitin extracted from shrimps were compared with commercial standard chitin (C9213) procured from Sigma-Aldrich. The yield obtained of isolated chitin was 23.78% with ash and moisture contents of 0.05% and 6.3% respectively. A low percentage of moisture and ash contents in isolated chitin indicate the efficiency of the extraction protocol employed. This shrimp's chitin compares with standard chitin using FTIR spectroscopy, proton solid-state NMR (1HSSNMR), X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The thermal behavior of chitin (both standard and samples) was checked with thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Both standard and extracted samples of chitins exhibited similar physicochemical and structural properties. The biological behavior of samples was also checked with different biological activities, which showed much dependence on the structure and concentration of samples.